I am not sure what direction to go with our retirement savings. We are in our mid-40s and in the past were fairly aggressive investors. We have an old 401k where most of our money is. My husband is at a new job now and we are starting to put a minimal amount in that 401k. Here's the deal:

Back in 2008, we anticipated a big crash and decided to get out of the markets. We ended up losing about 20% instead of 40%, so we kinda felt good about that. We've pretty much stayed out since then with the bulk of that money. BUT now that the markets have come back, I wish we had gotten back into our investments before now. OR, that we hadn't pulled out at all.

We did put some money into a couple of commodities-related mutual funds, figuring they might be good if'n there's inflation on the horizon. We also have a good-performing oil stock.

We are just feeling nervous about investing, due to things like the Europe situation, reading things about the whole economic system possibly collapsing, hyperinflation, etc. Lots of possible doom and gloom!

I am familiar with the conventional wisdom about investing. I am just finding it hard to follow it right now.

I've done some research and found some mutual funds that have done well. And of course indexing is always a good thing.

So, what do we do with the bulk of the money in the old 401k that's in cash right now? Should we dollar-cost average into some mutual funds over time with all of it? Should we leave a lot of it in cash or something similar, but invest maybe 20% of it in mutual funds and see how it goes? Should we stay in cash because the sky might be falling?

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